A Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system may improve unscheduled and scheduled maintenance operations. An SHM system may advantageously quickly identify occurrence of damage, determine damage location and size, and schedule an appropriate remedial maintenance action. Such an SHM system may reduce maintenance costs.
An SHM system employed with an aircraft, by way of example and not by way of limitation near the fuselage cargo door of an aircraft where baggage handlers may collide with and cause impact damage to the airplane fuselage, may reduce aircraft schedule cancellations and delays. An SHM system may be particularly advantageous when employed in connection with laminated structures to identify, locate and characterize delamination damage.
Large masses of data may be processed in an SHM system, in part because little is known regarding sensitivity of various parameters vis-à-vis damage characteristics. One resulting method may have been a tendency to process a large number of parameters to avoid missing something important. As a result of large volumes of data handling, an SHM system may yield computationally intensive and impractical methods, inaccurate damage detection results, false positives or false negatives because of data confusion.
There is a need for a method and system for quantifying damage in a structure that may be efficient and timely in operation.
There is a need for a method and system for quantifying damage in a structure that may employ parameters sensitive to identification and quantification of damage characteristics.